They need to carry two engines, batteries and a gas tank, that makes them pretty bad at being both an EV and a ICE vehicle. They are to heavy, have to little battery capacity to be a good EV. The batteries and electric engines make them to heavy to get good fuel mileage as a gas powered car.
I've meet exactly one person for who they made sense. He could get to an from work on battery alone, but not much more and he needed the combustion engine to haul a trailer every now and then. If he could have waited a few years, he could just have gotten an EV that did the same.
There might be locations where hybrids makes more sense, but now that the range of EVs have gotten much better I think that list is slowly shrinking.
The thing that's weird to me is the focus on getting rid of diesel, because EVs and diesel cars are not at all competing. EVs can replace gas powered cars, in most cases (depending on your location), but they can't replace diesel. Need to drive 500km a day? Diesel is probably your best bet and EVs are completely out.
Totally disagree. One of the reasons I drive an EV is so I _can_ plug it in and never go to a gas station again. What a useless exercise and waste of my time, especially for a penny-pincher like me who would wait in like for 20 minutes at Costco for gas.
For those not with an overnihht charging parking spot I can see the appeal though.
The surface area of a car usable for solar panels is about 3 square meters. At the absolute best, when the stars align just right, you're going to get about 1 kW of power out of these panels.
In other words, barely enough to offset the auxiliary systems in the car (cooling pumps, lights, computers, etc.)